shot at dawn

(hehe, sorry, couldn't resist ;))
lookit! BACKGROUND! ooooo...
another pic of sianrel, the main male character from my ongoing medieval fantasy/histfic novel, ravenspeed. he's an orphaned fletcher's apprentice and a crack shot with a longbow. and... well, yeah. i spent far, far, FAR too long on this when i should have been reading history books, writing essays and whatnot, but i think it's been worth the effort. i'm very pleased with it - particularly his face, his hair, his face, the sky, and did i mention his face? without a shadow of doubt the most sianrelesque sianrel i have ever drawn, and that maketh me happy. in fact i may have to upload a detail shot at some point so you can all look at his hair and his lovely gween eyes. yaysies.
i do archery now, but i didn't when i drew the pic, so i had to change the arrow completely. however, even i knew that shooting in that pose is silly to say the least - he's drawing, not shooting (ok, so it's an odd draw, but it's not wrong). the lighting is a bit warped, too. the anatomy isn't perfect but considering this is the first time i've ever drawn and coloured a shirtless man, it's decent enough for me.
and yes, he really is supposed to be that skinny. even though he's an archer. he's a strange lad.
pencil sketch, coloured in photoshop elements and paint shop pro. i used a photo i took of a sunrise as reference for the sky. looks nothing like the photo, but i give myself full permission anyway.

More by Jade Bailey

an introduction to my novel, written mostly last september and finished off earlier this year. hmm. i'm not too fond of this, but it's all i've got for the moment, and i always have massive problems with introductions anyway. the setting is a bit odd; the world is our own, the time is the very late 14th century, yet the island of raegovanda is entirely fictional. might be a bit hard to follow; see what you can work out...

the last bit of the first book, very different to the rest of it. the character featured here was one of my more successful characters from collaborative writing, so i decided to have him put in a cameo here. whether or not he will become a more important figure remains to be decided, but i really enjoy writing him. am very pleased with this, short as it is.

i finally got around to finishing this off! yay! although dialogue isn't too commonplace in my style of writing, i can't remember the last time i wrote something with so much thinking in it. back at the naencorran firiemh base, sianrel is lost, as ever, in his own thoughts - the quest both daunts and annoys him, particularly as he feels (quite rightly) that the ravenspeed has no faith in men so young. he struggles to make sense of what is happening, and, as you might expect, his fellow soldiers hardly make it easy for him...

*dons pythonesque voice* 'and now, for something completely different...'
*clears throat* i wanted to vary the perspectives a little bit, hence this rather short chapter. apart from wanting to break up all the back-and-forth morgan and sianrel narrative that probably drags after a while, i thought it would be interesting to have a look at the opinion taken by 'the dark side', so to speak. makes for something rather different, i think you'll agree. the narrator here, paron isvar (note that 'paron' means 'father' in mekuhvan), just like all other mekuhvans and members of the raethgeva, believes that all spelaethians are horrendously evil, while he himself is a force of good - a complete reversal of what the spelaethians think, of course. so i tried to make him seem more like a man who thought he was doing the right thing than someone who is downright evil. of course, the fact that his dear friend fièlgevan is naturally a nasty piece of work doesn't help. but then again, in every situation you'll always get a few nasty people, no matter who they're fighting for...
here we go, then. mind the accented e's. they like their accented e's in mekuhva, believe you me...